I make no secret of the fact that I love old computers, and that I think modern computers have lost their way in terms of providing utility to users. To that end, I write about, and think about, computers and the way to move computers forward, without losing site of the fact that computers should serve their users. I grew up with hand-me-down computers, from Atari to Apple to Dell, and in the process I got to experience a sizable portion of computer history very quickly, in my teen years.

I write about things that are informed by these opinions often. When I talk about building a World Wide Web analog without the internet, about reviving the BBS or when I lament the fact that Gopher was doomed to obscurity by the modern web, it is in response to my experiences with an array of computers from the dawn of the home computer revolution up through to the modern age. There was a time when computers were magical.

I had come, in recent months, to suspect that I might just be an old fuddy-duddy. I'm approaching 30 years old, and I had begun to feel like I was looking at modern computers and modern software through the lens of someone who was being left behind, shouting at the sky, shaking my fists at the kids on my lawn. I was coming to the conclusion that my love of these computers of my childhood, and of ones that I had never had the chance to interact with, was some kind of rose tinted nostalgia.

I had not fully subscribed to this theory, but it seemed more likely that I was romanticizing something that was actually Not Great that it was that nearly every modern software and hardware platform had inexplicably gotten shittier.

I am now prepaired to say, with conviction, that every modern hardware and software platform has gotten shittier, and that it's not inexplicable. I'm going to try to explain how I came to this conclusion, and give some potential explainations.

First, let me lay out a little bit about my technical literacy and my profession, this might help explain some of the assertions that I'm going to make. I started using computers, and the internet, in 1995. Our family computer, my first computer, ran Windows 3.11 (for workgroups). Later, in the late 90s, I was given an Atari 400 and reams of books and magazines on basic, followed shortly by an Apple II GS and dozens of disks of software.

I loved computers. I loved making weird little programs, and silly applications and games. I'd build things in GW Basic or Freebasic, and distribute it to my friends on floppy disks. Even in the latter half of the 00s, I was passing half broken games around on floppy disks (or collections on CD-Rs, when I could talk someone in to buying some for me.) Computers were, by and large, ubiquitous in my life. Nearly everyone had an old one they didn't want, and a new one they didn't understand.

I collected cast offs from neighbors, from thrift stores, from office upgrades. I rebuilt them, installed useful or fun software on them, and sold them or gave them away. All of my friends had computers of their own, because I had access to these machines, and I cared enough to outfit them with the appropriate software.

(It must be said, at this point, that 'useful' and 'appropriate' are relative terms. In 2009 I gave a good friend a computer that had been built for Windows 98. It was running Puppy Linux from a CD, and saving data to a USB flash drive over USB 1.1. It did word processing, email, and basic web browsing. It had a whopping 64MB of RAM, and was covered in glitter, googley eyes, and carpet samples. But it was free, and it wasn't useless, and that was important.)

I went to school to become a programmer, and discovered that I don't enjoy programming as it exits today. I understand it well enough, and I *can* do it, but I don't *want* to. I make websites, and I build tools to help other people use computers.

I make my living as a systems administrator and support engineer. (and I'm looking for a new gig, if you're hiring.) That's a fancy way of saying that I solve people's computer problems. Professionally, I'm responsible for identifying and mitigating the shortcomings of various computer systems.

Some of these shortcomings are legitimate bugs. Some of them are bafflingly short sighted or poorly considered architectural decisions. Just as many are cases of a divergence between the needs of the user and the abilities of a program. Modern programs are often feature incomplete, poorly supported, and difficult or impossible to customize. Modern computers are often slow, and cranky. I'm responsible for handling the fallout of this unfortunate situation.

I've seen how revolutionary a computer can be, if it is designed with the needs of the user in mind, and how disastrous the same can be when it is not. I've seen computers used to empower people, and used to oppress. I've seen computers be Good, and the consequences of when they are not.

So that's who I am, and my experience with computers so far. Those are my credentials, and my qualifications.

The Computer Chronicles was a TV show that ran from the early 80s through the early 00s. Over it's nearly 20 year run, The Computer Chronicles covered nearly every facet of the newly developing Computer industry. It was hosted by people with Opinions.

The guests were, frequently, people who were proud of the things they made, or the software they represented.

Watching the developer of CP/M and DR DOS talk to a mainframe engineer who worked at IBM in the 50s about the future of computers as seen from the 1980s was eye opening.

On the one hand, this show serves as an excellent introduction to, or reminder of, the capabilities of computers 35 years ago. It helps us see how far we've come in terms of miniaturization, while also demonstrating again that, in many ways, there is nothing new under the sun.

Before the advent of the internet, reporters were writing their stories on laptops and sending them in over phone lines, 25 years before the release of the iphone HP released a computer with a touchscreen, three years before microsoft released he first version of windows Apple and Visicorp demontrated GUIs wih features that Windows wouldn't be able to approach for another 9+ years.

And, of course, I'm reminded again of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of all Demos", in which he demonstrated the mouse, the GUI, instant messaging, networked gaming, and basically every other important development of the following 50 years.

It took 5 years for Xerox to refine and miniturize Engelbart's ideas to the point that they thought they could market them, and another 10 years before Apple refined and further miniturizaed the same ideas, and brought us the Mac.

The whole video of Engelbart's Online System (NLS) is available on youtube. Some of it is *really* interesting. Most of it is unfortunately dry. It's easy to forget that this was 50 years ago, and also mindblowing that it was only 50 years ago.

Anyway, back to Computer Chronicles. In an episode about Word Proccessors, the man they were interviewing said "There's a lot of talk about making people more computer literate. I'd rather make computers more people literate." There's a phrase that resonated with me in a big way.

It sounds like the kind of semantic buzzword shuffling so common in standard corporate speak, but I got the impression that the guy that said it, believed it. He believed that computers had gotten powerful enough that they no longer had to be inscrutable.

There were others working around the same time on similar ideas, or at least from a similar philosophy. Working to make computers, if not intuitive, at least comprehensible. I think this is a noble goal.

The computer is often thought of as a tool, but it is more like a tool shed, in which we store a collection of tools, a source of power, and a workspace.

The tools of the 60s and 70s were primitive, partially because of the limited space and limited power our toolbox could provide for them, but also because our ideas and understanding of how these tools should work were limited by the audience who was using the tools.

That is to say, in the 60s and 70s, computers were weak and slow and computer users were also computer programmers. A small, tight knit circle of developers and computer scientists were responsible for the bulk of the progress made in that time, and the idea of designing tools for non-technical users was never considered.

Computer culture had, by and large, a kind of elitism about it as a result of the expense and education required to really spend much time with a computer. This changed, slowly, starting in the mid 70s with the development of the Microcomputer Market and CP/M.

Computers became more affordable, slowly. Affordable computers became more powerful, quickly. Within 10 years, non-technical users were interacting with computers on a daily basis. It was against the beginnings of this backdrop that the phrase I mentioned earlier was coined. "Human Literate Computers" or "Human Centered Computing."

Ease of Use was the holy grail for a lot of computer companies. A computer that was so easy to use that they could sell it to grandma. But, to me at least, Human Literate and Easy to Use are distinct ideas. Many modern applications are Easy to Use. Netflix is Easy to Use. Facebook is, for all it's faults, pretty easy to use. The iPhone, the iPad, and ChromeOS are super easy to use.

Well, they are easy to use as long as you use them in the prescribed way. As long as you let them tell you what you want to do, instead of the other way around.

That, IMO, is the distinction.

I think that many of the steps towards demystifying the computer of the 80s and 90s did good work, but ultimately, the computer industry left the whole idea behind, in favor of making some tasks Very Easy while making other tasks Practically Impossible, and turning everything into a surveillance device.

It was because Jobs wanted the Computer to be an Appliance. A thing only used in prescribed ways.

Letting people build their own tools means letting people control their own destiny.

If I can make what I want, or if someone else can make what they want, and then I can take it apart and improve it, why would I pay for an upgrade? Why would I pay you to build something that doesn't meet my needs?

The last 10 years of development in computers were a mistake. Maybe longer.

Instead of making computers Do More, or making them Feel Faster, we've chased benchmarks, made them more reliant on remote servers, and made them less generally useful. We brought back the digital serfdom of the mainframe.

@ajroach42 I want to respond, elaborate, & discuss at length here. I spent about 10 months some years ago immersed in the computing literature around the history of debuggers, during which I went from EDSAC to Visual Studio, but also all the other half-dead ends ends of computing history such as, e.g., Lisp machines.

Naturally, I came out of it a Common Lisper, and also naturally, with Opinions about modern computing.

@ajroach42@ciaby This was the Great Debate that was largely won by Microsoft. "Everyone can 'use' a computer.". That is to say, everyone can operate the appliance with preinstalled software. *everyone*. Apple pioneered the notion, but it turns out to be the preferred mode for businesses, who really rather don't like having specialized experts.

all these systems collapsed at a point: the point where the fundamental reality of the problem met the fundamental reality of the machine.

programming had to occur.

Apple solved this by making so many programs available on the iThings for so many niche issues, that programmers would code what was needed and the user didn't have to care anymore about surmounting the issue.

so here's the problem: you're right. computers are easier to use, fsvo of use.

but the truth was, back when computers were harder to use, in the 90s... people really hated learning how to use them. there was an immense demand for not having to think (there's a book called "don't make me think" about this whole problem).

so we have this weird place where no one outside of the "'elite" wanted to care, and they resented being made to care.

@ajroach42@ciaby Also, lisp machines were made by hippie engineers who were really bad at business. so that didn't work out.

but you have this enormous tension between Lisp "we expect you to come up to our level, here's the manual, we'll answer all your Qs", and Windows/Java "here's the basics, don't poke yourself with the sharp bits"

as an example of Lisp-world, for instance - it had debuggers that essentially ran as in-process monitors that could take and trigger recovery actions based on logical conditions - in '92. we don't have that today, and in languages which are compiled, it will never exist.

@upshotknothole@ajroach42@ciabyI'll try to remember to test that tomorrow. JetBrains really does great work, it's possible they've done it! I don't have the reference to the '92 implementation handy, but it was ridiculously sophisticated, not just a simple conditional/monitor of a simple slot.

@pnathan@ajroach42@ciaby we will always need the sort of low-level interactivity.Overall, with easy-to-read websites that somehow accellerate the reader into thinking "hey, this system is larger then it seems. Reading into it or at least hiring someone who read into it will crease business values" value is created.

@pnathan@ajroach42@ciabyA sort of side dilemma with this is that, by turning computers into magic boxes for making increasingly complex layers of tasks accessible to average people, this understanding gap just widens. Average users become increasingly disconnected from even a baseline understanding of the processes and design patterns at work in computing, and the knowledge of the "elites" becomes ever more rarified.

@pnathan@ajroach42@ciabyHow can there ever be reasoned popular discourse about the practical, moral, and political implications of modern computing, if you have to be a developer or programmer to even understand the basic concepts?

@pnathan@ajroach42@ciabyVery true. The "outrage machine" is a pretty easily understandable by-product of FB and Twitter, because it is so overt. By contrast, I think average people have much less of an understanding, for example, of the APIs, tracking pixels/widgets, apps, etc., the FB and Twitter algorithms use to collect and aggregate data about them, or how that data gets used to tailor their everyday experience.

@pnathan@ajroach42@ciaby I think most people are still fairly ignorant (perhaps willfully so) of how closely they are tracked and how their phones make their every action a data point.

Similarly, to riff on the chemistry example, most people are blissfully ignorant about all the *stuff* that gets put in their food and most of the inhumane or unsustainable process that are used to create it.

@cossimo@ajroach42@ciaby I don't think it's precisely a tangent though: invisibility and lack of understanding - or lack of desire to understand - helped build the problem we have today.

if all users really cared deeply about understanding and collapsing the user/programmer division, then we'd probably all be using a Linux core with a Lisp machine on top; everyone would intuitively understand algorithms and how the net worked.

@ajroach42@ciabyI argue that Linux is closer to the old paradigm - users and programmers are much closer and there is a strong pressure to be "some" kind of programmer, even if its just a scary terminal shell occasionally.

@ajroach42@ciaby the more you ask Unicorn to interop with the existing world, the more you constrain to the limitations and expectations of the existing system, which tends to remove agency of the operator.

I frankly think its time to build a new OS from the assembly on up to empower people, but I'm loathe to take that on when I'm dependent on a company to pay mortgage and health insurance

Hi, I'm probably near the age of @pnathan, and while I'm not a lisper anymore (ages went from my emacs fluency) I agree with all he said.

To give some context, I'm a polyglot programmer currently working on a brand new operating system http://jehanne.io

Now, the assumption that you seem to share is that people cannot learn how to program. I used to think this too.Now however I realized that it's like we were scribas of Ancient Egypt arguing that people cannot write.

@Shamar@ajroach42@ciaby ... continuing. Next year, maybe you want a different model, so you break off and redo it a bit. Now you have to figure out how to juggle two incompatible models in your code, and you're on your way to inventing an abstract interface system.

here's my claim: software is crystallized thought, with all the complexities, ambiguities, and changing over time of thoughts. we can gut the whole shaky tower of modern computing, and we'll still be confronted with the core problem (even assuming a workable and standard bit of hardware for the engineering problems, themselves non-trivial sometimes)

I've not. I've just a natural inclination at finding the orthogonal axes that govern complex problems, thus I'm pretty good at moving from a point to another in such multidimensional systems (aka solving problems or forsee and avoid them).

I recently realized that the web is still a weapon of the USA DARPA (that sometimes backfires).And #Javascript so far is the apex of the militar technology so far: we run all over the world code under the control of USA companies (that in turn are in control of the USA government).

there isn't a bright line between programming and passive computer use. all UIs are programming languages. most are simply shitty, overly constrained languages that make simple tasks nearly impossible.

@enkiv2@pnathan@Shamar@ajroach42@ciaby Those are good charts that depict a useful idea, but I don't think what they describe is what most people know as a “learning curve”—which would be proficiency (as a percent of the tool’s available capability, y-axis) across time spent (x-axis).

@pnathan@ciaby@ajroach42@joeld@Shamar You're right. They describe the difficulty of solving a problem with a tool vs the inherent difficulty of that problem -- which is essentially an inverse of the learning curve for tools that can address all problems. Tools that fail by making tasks that aren't easy impossible, of course, have a misleadingly good-looking learning curve.

It's more or less the difference between grasping at reading words so that you can better serve your Lord with the shopping list, and being able to write a #political article on a newspaper to fight for your #rights.

@Shamar@pnathan@ciaby I feel like you think this was a clever point, but I don't understand what you mean.

Programming is a specialty, and some people have other specialties. Expecting them to also become expert programmers because our current expert programmers can't be arsed to make extensible and understandable tools is unreasonable.

@ShamarI feel that it's not only a matter of research, but also a point of throwing away some tech that we take for granted (x86, for example) and rebuild from scratch with different assumptions in mind. In the current economic system I find it quite hard to do... @pnathan@ajroach42

Most programmers are not well versed about #history, and it's a pity. There's a lot to learn for us, from history.

Technology is probably the most powerful and effective way to change the world. Most changes in human organizations have been allowed by technological innovations: from fire to boats, from bronze to iron, through argricolture, writing, counting, roads, from sword to guns...

@Shamar@ajroach42@pnathanThat's possible, and somehow is already happening.What I'm talking about, however, goes much deeper than that. I'm talking about open hardware infrastructures, where every component is documented, there are no binary blobs or proprietary firmware .Very important is also the instruction set, because what we have now (x86/amd64) is incredibly bloated and full of backward compatibility shit.RISC-V is a step in the right direction. If only the hardware wasn't so expensive... ;)

the mail servers fail. the administration is confusing because docs aren't perfect, so it gets misconfigured. the network goes down. baby pukes on server and it fails to boot. server is overloaded by volume of spam.

then the task is outsourced to a guy interested in managing the emails....... whoop whoop we're recentralizing.

@Shamar@ciaby@ajroach42 my Inner Young Geek wants to argue that actual configurable systems are actually not used in the home outside and that mail servers cross that barrier between appliance and administrating-needing machine.

but let's not rabbit trail onto that. ;-)

more my contention and question is: should we expect a member of cyberspace to be knowledgable in minor sysadmin?

I argue yes! we expect people to be able to refill their oil in cars, right?

a better metaphor is cooking. everybody is expected to know enough about cooking to feed themselves. some people cook at a much more expert level, and people who are capable of feeding themselves pay those experts to feed them occasionally. cooking for yourself has benefits over eating out even if you aren't very good, because you can cater to unusual preferences.

@enkiv2@pnathan@ajroach42cooking for yourself also keeps the cost of eating out down, because professionals are competing with free. if all professional chefs started doing something (like cooking 'rare' burgers as well-done to avoid liability), home cooking isn't subject to those rules.

It's possible because cookbooks are mostly for the intermediate talented-amateur cook.

@pnathanAt scale, yes. Although I feel that software is not evolving because:The effort to develop new OS is too great, given the amount and complexity of the modern hardware (and closed specs). Without a new OS, you can't develop new paradigms, and so we're stuck with ideas from the 70s (unix mostly, plus VMS-influenced Windows). Programming languages are going to use the OS, and that's why we're not really progressing...My proposal: simpler hardware, open and documented. Build on top of that. No backward compatibility. :) @ajroach42@Shamar

@pnathanOr, why not just use SFTP, with a FUSE filesystem on the server?You can use a file manager and text editor, and you can have interaction, as well as authentication through SSH.I think it even supports FIFOs...

sorry for digging up this old thread, but I have one remark that's been on my mind since I saw your post:

I knew how to read and write when I was 4. I don't remember how I learned it, but I guess I wanted to learn it, or found it fun.Are not all people like that? Do other people only learn to read when forced to at school?Is there a correlation between programmers and people who learnt to read before school?

@Wolf480pl@Shamar@ajroach42@ciaby@pnathan I don't remember learning to read either, but different people learn at different paces, and learning later has little correlation to academic performance. The main correlation is being forced to learn to read causing later lack of interest in reading.

@ajroach42@seanl@Shamar@ciaby@pnathanOTOH, I've seen state money being spent to pic the best students and provide them with an individualized education path, so that'd mean the state actually wants to support hackers... weird...

@Wolf480pl@pnathan@ciaby@Shamar@seanl this isn’t addressing the issue in any substantive way, unless you’re trying to bait someone in to saying we should abolish the education system for the good of education.

@ajroach42@seanl@Shamar@ciaby@pnathanbut assuming we have infinite money and perfect management, how many children do you think should be in a single class? And how do we get enough good teachers to make that happen?

Also, as @seanl said, everyone has a different pace of learning. Moreover, we want to promote curiosity. IMO the school model where it's scheduled that "in year X, all children learn Y" doesn't fit that requirements well.

@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathan@Wolf480pl Part of the problem is that bureaucracies are extremely bad at producing high performance when results are difficult to measure. This is how we get bad teachers who can't be fired, because the bureaucracy can only fire based on easily measurable things, and the unions won't allow measurement of even things that can be measured, often for good reasons.

There are bureaucracies that do a better job of educating than the average US school district. I'd submit that none of them do a great job of educating. Education really needs to be continuous and ambient.

@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathan@Wolf480pl Actually I think the way you get educated people is by having a culture that values learning. American culture does not, and that's why we have a shitty educational system. I don't see how you can fix the educational system without shifting the culture.

@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathan Most arguments that point to European countries really boil down to "Well just have a smaller, substantially less diverse country that is less anti-intellectual and everything will be fine."

@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathan I am not a fan of "well it works for you but it won't work for us because our requirements are special," but I think that when it comes to things like education and welfare there are qualities of the US that are both special and non-optional. And the diversity angle is one nearly everyone misses.

@seanl@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathanwell I'm not saying there are solutions that work for EU but not for US. The problem is present in EU too.I understand that you have experience only with education system of USA. Sorry for the knee-jerk reaction.

@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathan Ah sorry what I meant was that in general I don't like the class of argument I myself was trying to make, which is that just because solution X works for country Y that doesn't mean it will work for country Z because we're different" without pointing to the exact ways that there are differences. In particular scale is often used as a difference that requires no explanation even though IMO you have to show WHY something won't scale.

@seanl@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathanWhat I was afraid of is that aside from common problems present education systems in both US and EU, there are some other issues in US that are significantly greater, and therefore the common issues go unnoticed there.

@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathan I'm sure that's true. One common problem that I think is pretty evident in the US is that people think of education as being something that happens in school, that's the school's/government's responsibility, rather than everyone's responsibility and happening everywhere and all the time.

@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@Shamar@ciaby@pnathan If anything I think this is less a problem among segments of the US population than it is in a lot of other countries, particularly ones with "better" education systems.

As for kids that do not like to go to school, I have three daughters and the eldest is in 4th elementary. She is pretty good at everything (evidently she got her mother's genes) including math and science (where I was pretty good too, but for my joy, her math talent beat my own!)

Still, each damn morning she don't want to go to school. Each day she has homeworks to do, it take much much more time to start doing them than to do them.

Substantially less diversed countries in Europe? Who say this should come in Italy and travel it for a year: she will not interact two days with the same culture.

Where I live, while we all speak Italian more or less in the same way, each village has its own dialect (a sort of local language). At work at times we enumerate the different names we would use to say common things like rabbit or bread or unmarried girl or unmarried old man... LONG LIST!

@Shamar@Wolf480pl@ciaby@pnathan Italy is an interesting case being formed from a bunch of separate city-states, but the cultures that are there have typically been in their given regions for a long time, no? Even so, I think Italy has some of the same challenges as the US due to the diversity of cultures, and many of the same problems result.

What you said is true but partial: Italy was a place of several mix of cultures for at least 3 thousand years. We are a deep genetic mix of north african and indo european people. And our cultures have a comparable complexity. I was not kidding: each Italian village has its language or its set of traditions. We can live in peace because we like such differences.

I don't know the US enough to say if your comparison holds. But it's the first time I've read it.

Even in Italy, where you can literally breath, drink and eat so many different cultures each few kilometers, politicians disregards and continuously demage culture and schools.

The fact is that people with a good culture are harder to manipulate.Also the Italian school has been demaged by the cold war between USA and URRS: we have had a complex set of effects here, including politics damaging the education system to fight comunism among teachers.

@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@seanl@Shamar@ciaby to be even more blunt, most people aren't that unique or that interested in learning what's needed for general life success and achievement. That's the point of a regularized mandated curriculum: to ensure, on average, people know enough to be good citizens.

the legendary lack of care for education produces the antipathy towards education in the USA.

if you want excellent education, you must make rich kids go to public schools.

@Shamar@pnathan@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@ciaby From a political standpoint, forcing the rich to send their kids to public schools would certainly improve the quality of the public schools. Or it might just get the rich to move elsewhere.

In Palo Alto, one of the richest cities in the US, the wealthy largely send their kids to the public schools. Reason being that Palo Alto itself is exclusive, so the public schools are essentially private. They have parks that don't allow non-locals.

@Shamar@pnathan@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@ciaby And that's what you'll get if you ban private schools & home schooling. Many more communities will start looking like Palo Alto, and public schools in poor communities will continue to suck. And then the rich will fight any requirements to bus kids around, funding for said buses, etc.

@Shamar@pnathan@Wolf480pl@ajroach42@ciaby If anything, banning private schools would *benefit* the rich because instead of forfeiting the taxes they spend on public education, they'd now be getting them back.

@ajroach42@Shamar@pnathan@Wolf480pl@ciaby I'm not sure how it is in other states, but in California the quality of the local schools is one of the top drivers of where upper middle class people choose to live. In my family's case we picked the school first and then moved near the school. Even if people didn't relocate right away, over time the clustering would happen, and it would be worse because there'd be no private school fallback.

@Shamar@ciaby@seanl@Wolf480pl@pnathan having worked in public and religious schools, most religious schools in the US are regressive and every one I’ve ever set foot in (many) have been horribly abusive.

I lose so much respect for people that subject their kids to that stuff.

@seanl@ajroach42@pnathan@Wolf480pl@ciaby@Shamar In the city I live in (Newark, OH), the public school system has a perception of being where you send your kids to become drug dealers, whereas the religious schools are where you send your kids to learn. (Most of them are Catholic in my area, AFAIK.)

@Shamar@pnathan@ajroach42@seanl@ciabyfrom what I've heard about catholic schools in Poland, they're the greatest source of atheists. If you're kinda-religious, and your parents send you to a religious school, you'll see the church's hypocrisy from so close that you won't want to have anything in common with Catholic Church anymore.

There is also another explanation to this fact: when you see that the world outside the school follow certain goals and values and your teachers propose to follow completely different ones, you realize that you can choose. Or even go for your own road, being skeptical about botb the world and the religion.

@pnathan@ajroach42@seanl@Shamar@ciabyso what you're saying is:- to achieve success in a modern society, you need to have some basic skills that everyone is expected to have, before you reach the age of 18- most people don't want to learn those skills before the age of 18- we should force them to learn those skills so that they can be successful

When you force a group of kids to do a scientific experiment,and then another, and then another one too, and then you let them alone in the lab, what do you think they will do?

On my first chemistry lab the first question to the teacher that one of my classmates did was: how can I build nitroglycerine?The teacher said: oh you could, we have everything you need, here. But I won't teach you the procedure, you'll have to discover yourself!

@Wolf480pl@pnathan@ciaby@Shamar@seanl Having come out of a G&T program, I can attest that it's less about supporting us, and more about keeping us from causing problems for other people (and, honestly, keeping us alive.)

Hackers are difficult to manipulate, they respect what you do and ignore what you represent, so in a way they can become annoying to the leaders of any organisation. OTOH not every annoying person is an hacker. Also hackers can be pretty well integrated in the same organisations, because the whole group benefits from their original perspectives.

The Hollywood sociopathic hacker is a misrepresentation: more hackers would be a problem for the power.

@Shamar@ajroach42@seanl@ciaby@pnathanOk, so hackers are a danger to those with power.But would the society be able to function if, say, 50% of people were unaffected by any manipulation by those with power? Or would it turn into a chaos?

I haven’t experienced this much lively yet civil engagement on social media... ever? You all (and others who have piped in along the way) have presented a lot of great points and interesting opinions and I look forward to reading through the thread in its entirety when I get the chance this weekend.

I have a few dozen replies to get through. If I'm still awake after that, I'll continue my thoughts. I have a lot more to say, but I'm not sure if I have the energy tonight. Might have to pick it back up after work tomorrow.

Lots of people in the replies to my original thread had lots of very negative comments about computer users vs computer programmers, and some of them seem to think that every human alive (excepting themselves) is some kind of half creature, incapable and undeserving of tools designed to meet their needs.

But they come at the cost of massive surveillance, an increased reliance on remote servers for what should be local or peer-to-peer activities, and marginal increases, or outright decreases, in actual utility on nearly every other front.

@ajroach42 the "internet" as we know it now is a lot bigger, but the bigger problem is, everyone is trying to make money off everything now. Very few spaces on the internet aren't trying to make money off the user in an underhanded way.

@ajroach42 I've still got a lightning talk (5 or 10 minutes) under my belt, "Users vs. Programmers" to give at Akademy or something similar. Not this year, though, I don't have the spoons. What I want to do is prove that every programmer is also a user unless they make all their own tools.

@ajroach42 I need an animator to make me a tiny clip in which a stick figure kicks the A out of COMPLAINTS, pushes the I to the left, and sits down in the gap to reveal the letters ME on their shirt, making the word into COMPLIMENTS.

@ajroach42 I feel like, fundamentally, the approach to what a computer should be *for* has changed.

I'd argue that, from the 1930s to the early 1970s or so, computers were primarily built to solve some sort of task first and foremost. There was plenty of experimentation with those computers, and there were occasionally purely experimental machines, but the industry was focused on meeting business and governmental needs.

People wanted a computer, not necessarily to do a certain task for them, but *for the sake of having a computer*, so they could tinker with it.

The earlier large computer users were programmers as well in many cases, and some were enthusiastic, but ultimately, they used a computer because they were paid to make the computer owner's job easier.

@ajroach42 However, as the tinkerers tried to figure out what to do with their new computers, and actually made them useful, they became useful to people who wanted a tool, not a toy, and that's where the pressure to strip out toy functionality started creeping in, in the 1980s.

That's why it feels like we've returned to the mainframe model of control - because the average 2018 computer owner and the average 1968 computer owner want the same thing.

@hairylarry@ajroach42 I think that the need to convince people to buy your software over and over, and now to subscribe to updates, means you need to be constantly adding "features". Commercial software can never be "done".

@ajroach42Disagree. Firstly I'm not persuaded that the mainframe is a bad thing, and secondly pervasive computing infrastructure allows us to do things we couldn't before.

The question is who controls it it and to whom are they answerable? Mastodon is like Usenet: control is distributed. There are problems with that as Usenet found, but they're radically different from the problems creared by monopolists like Facebook.

@ajroach42Fair enough, I didn't see that. But I'd plead there's far more to pervasive computing than new ways of spying on OTHER people. I really appreciate the many new ways of spying on myself. It allows me to track and map my cycling, correlate my mood with local weather, compute my blood clotting factor and adjust my medication, remind myself when I need to leave home to get to events, and advise me the best way to get there avoiding traffic. It makes my life better.

@Thepunkgeek there was a time when, at least for certain definitions of the word computer, no one could afford home computers, so they had terminals and dialed in to corporate or educational mainframes.

They had no control over these systems. They were serfs, limited by the will of the sysadmin who controlled what programs they could run, how long they could stay logged in, and what files they were allowed to access. They had no privacy.

@ajroach42 thanks! I agree with you that users should be able to understand the various components that go into their OS, do you think that the best way to approach this is to have users set up their own OSes? I'm kind of thinking an archlinux type approach, but where the set up would be interactive in the sense that an explanation of each step is provided.

@theoutrider@ajroach42I love SmileBASIC on 3DS! It truly feels like a little Apple or Commodore and can be surprisingly powerful. If it had external I/O (save/load/print), I think I could use it as a primary computer.

@ajroach42 where there was once a linear learning curve there is a blockade now.People start from zero, as always, learn their way up but then once they write nested if statements within giant Excel documents they hit a ceil.There's no easy path for replacing the excel code with, say, python.

The excel community greatly celebrated the introduction of the SWITCH statement.(I'm not sure about the version but I think it was introducted in Excel 2016 ??)

@upshotknothole@ajroach42 Ceilings are everywhere. During the late '90s I solved most of my programming problems using Perl. Then everything had to be Object Oriented, and I just couldn't get it. Until today. I can somewhat understand and debug OO code in various languages, but I'm not able to write anything useful. Everything seems opaque and indirect and unnecessarily complex.

@profoundlynerdy@ajroach42 I'm all for all the little things that spark an interest in coding in young minds, but in all honesty I'd expect the JavaScript console in all non-mobile browsers will introduce two orders of magnitudes more people to coding than Raspberry π?

@22@ajroach42 Because JS is limited to the browser in a lot of ways. Yes, I know you can run JS from a console if you want, but that's not obvious to the novice.

Python, by contrast is a good general purpose programming language that is syntactically easy to read (like BASIC, unlike Perl) and not so low level that you have to worry about pointers (as in C) directly.

1. The lack of a GUI keeps things down to the brass tacks. If you give a new programmer a GUI they'll play with the GUI and not much else.

2. While JS dominates for client-side scripting in the browser, I think its going to have competition soon. I expect browsers will add Python interpreters soon-ish as MS Office recently did, if I'm not mistaken.

1. I shudder to think how many kids we keep away from math and engineering by making them think that they have to be good at grade school arithmetic and calculation first. Similarly, I am ecstatic that visual (Processing.js, Cinder, OpenFramekworks, Scratch) and audible (Sonic Pi) programming draw so many in. As a learner and a teacher, I do not believe beginners should be made to prove themselves with stodgy, boring "basics".

@profoundlynerdy2. No matter what language one uses to make the browser dance (I've used Elm, ClojureScript, TypeScript, and plain JS), you have to learn the "browser way of doing things" (async, DOM, etc.). More than just JavaScript I meant that the browser is my preferred ecosystem to teach beginners and intermediates—nothing I've seen excites as many and as much as making universal webapps.

(JS also rocks server-side. I find myself writing CLI apps/scripts just as often in Node as Python.)

@profoundlynerdy Full transparency—I write C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Julia, Matlab for a living, I like all languages and everything that brings people into this rewarding hobby and career. I love Raspberry πs! And yes, each learner is an individual with their own interests, their own hidden eigenvectors that can propel them into a lifelong love of computing, so no blanket statements here. I just look at students' excitement about browsers today and can't see the dark age that @ajroach42 sees.

@ajroach42 Super-duper thank you for your thoughtful remarks. You've convinced me to keep a Raspberry π+display+io with Pico-8 and Sonic Pi prepared. Yes, I'm mostly familiar with the high schoolers or older crowd (see http://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/09/02/ for a friend's story), and younger kids with only a shared tablet is a whole other level of complexity, I now see. Thank you! @profoundlynerdy

John Taylor #Gatto in "Underground history of American education" railed against that cruel confounding of skills:

"#Pepys could only add and subtract right up to the time of his appointment to the Admiralty, but then quickly learned to multiply and divide to spare himself embarrassment. … You can learn what you need, even the technical stuff, at the moment you need it or shortly before."

@profoundlynerdy You know, this is probably where we get all these stupid people asking math/puzzle questions on coding interviews—this absurd 1990s notion that skill in grade school math (not really math, more like calculation) is correlated with skill in coding. There's no valid reason to ask for Gauss' sum formula tricks to see if you can code—if there was, you might as well as about KD-trees or FFTs. If you like people who like math, fine, but don't pretend you're interviewing for coders.

Your'e much better off asking algorithm questions that are actually relevant:

* What is the purpose of a linked list?* How might I optimize this to use less memory? Insert [example of a giant left-hand grab of SQL data that uses 2GB data]. Expected answer: stack/queue one 2 MB record at a time [example code].

JS is hard to read. It's hard to write. I've been doing web development for 10 years, and I still regularly stuff up little JS stuff in dumb ways (partially because I don't actually touch JS often, and partially because it's syntactically dense.)

It's not a bad environment for learning; there's a number of examples, auto indention / reformatting, code completion, a visual GUI layout tool, some iOS-specific modules, and the full Python docs included.

For code sharing, they use Air Drop to share projects and Working Copy to store history.

We haven't done much with Codea. The environment is really nice, but I haven't used Lua much, so I'm less comfortable helping them in it.

@ajroach42 The "Post-PC" era really is just the "consumer, not creator" era, which is particularly and darkly ironic considering Apple's success at marketing themselves as the purveyor of hardware and software for 'creatives'.

@ajroach42 Alan Kay has criticized the iPad for being a consumption-only device. The problem is, I can see kids who wouldn't want to use a raspberry pi to make games because their friends don't have one

Other kids want one, because he has one. (Of course, then we run in to the problem that, in this case, the Pi is a linux system, and that it really expects someone to know what they are doing in order to configure it. )

Getting the software configured is non-trivial. It's not hard, exactly, but it's beyond the average 8 year old, and also beyond many parents without previous linux experience.

I've been toying with the idea of putting together a distro for the pi to simplify getting starter, or auditing the available distros so that I could recommend one to the parents that, through the grapevine, end up asking me about it.

@ajroach42 Were I in the position of guiding a young person toward programming, writing games, etc., I would consider the firefox as the platform, and show them how to get to the javascript console. This would have many of the benefits of Hypercard and the BASICs of the even more distant past, mainly instantaneous gratification, getting visible results with relatively little effort, and the opportunity to play with with stuff.

@emdeesee I addressed why I think this is a bad idea elsewhere in this thread, in passing, but I'll be glad to get in to it in more detail if you'd like.

First: comparing JS to hypercard demonstrates to me that you've never used hypercard. The difference in levels of complexity between the two are massive. In all seriousness, go watch a hypercard tutorial, or open a stack in the editor and get a feel for how simple it is to work with.

@emdeesee 2: JS is massive and complciated and difficult to read. It can be an introductory programming language, but I don't think it makes a good one, and especially not for an 8 year old. He's doing very well with lua, and has been considering Python.

@emdeesee 3: In order to share the things you've made in the development console in firefox, you have to copy them out of the development console and in to a text editor, save them, and then either view them locally or upload them. The process is complex. Web hosting is more complicated than swapping files on flash drives or dropbox (I recognize that you could share the website files on flash drives or via dropbox, but I'd still argue that this is more complex than swapping .p8 files)

@ajroach42 Presumably, one does not jump directly in to metaclasses or even, well, classes when one starts with Python as a learning language. Similarly, one need not embrace all the complexity of javascript or web development to make the browser do a little dance or print "haha butts" 1000 times like I would never have done on the display TRS80 at my local Radio Shack.

Pico-8 looks pretty neat; I'm just not familiar with it. It looks like great way to have fun with programming.

The reason I like these platforms is because they reveal the source code for their games, and integrate an editor. This means that you can start by modifying someone else's simple program rather than trying to write your own from scratch.

@ajroach42 I should also say that when I was new to programming, printing "haha butts" 1000 times on the machine at the mall was the height of technical achievement. That probably colors my pedagogical notions, and what a new learner might feel is satisfying.

@ajroach42 I've used Hypercard extensively, making both apps and informational decks, though I was already an adult when Hypercard emerged. It was easy to get to do simple things and difficult to get to do complex things. But you *could* do complex things, which always felt like an accomplishment when it worked out.

It was also limited to the most expensive personal computing platform of the time.

@ajroach42 Unfortunately, my experience with this was with an unmotivated learner, and the results were ... unfulfilling for both of us.

We tried Logo and Python; this was around 2005, with a 12 year old, my daughter. Now she's learning Python on her own, and occasionally comes to me with questions, and to say, "I wish I'd let you teach me to program back in the day." 😀

@ajroach42 there are tons of apps on the ipad that are made for kids to let them learn how to code and make simple games. the problem is, that the ipad is made so you can't mess with the underlying system and apps aren't easily portable to other platforms. but then again pico8 has the exact same problem.

The thing that appealed to me about pico-8 is that there was an existing library of thousands of games across an amazing array of complexity, all of which have their source code available and modifiable in app.

@ajroach42 don't get me wrong, i think setting up something like pico-8 is far better than an ipad-app.

i just wish there was more kid-friendly material on programming real machines. i see stuff like pico-8 and tic-80 more as educational toys.

i held some programming tutorials for kids (age 10 to 15) using #Haskell. if you present it in a beginner-friendly manner, that works really well. probably should make publicly available material about that.

@ajroach42 I think there is something synister in tablets and smartphones that whispers into ears "Don't bother creating anything, it is too much work and you are bad at things anyways, just consume this instead". Opensource communities and hardware on the other hand bellow "MAKE STUFF" like a warcry while brandishing how-tos and guides.

@ajroach42 I think org mode (in emacs), especially with its literate programming capabilities, presents a vision of the future you guys want. No other computer interface I have encountered is so powerful, hackable, and easy to understand. Org mode is relatively easy to use while providing an incredible range of capability because it doesn't insert layers of UI that abstract what the user sees and does from what the computer sees and does. It just uses super simple markdown esque symbols.

@ajroach42 Except that he could totally do that on his iPad. And he could make games that are more responsive and user-friendly with better graphics. And actually put it on App Store for everyone else to play. 😉

@ajroach42 I disagree with the main theme of the thread as well. There are some factually incorrect statements like your comment about modern programs and that modern computers are slow. Even the new iPad Pro is a faster machine than most PCs from just 5-6 years ago. Yes, modern software is complex but that’s because they’re crammed with features, not cos they’re feature incomplete. Those features enable you to go from concept to presentation in just minutes instead of hours, for eg

@ajroach42 I’ll tell you an example. Everyday, every time my iPhone X unlocks with facial recognition or animates emojis by reading my gestures, I get lost in awe at how fast the object recognition and classification must be happening behind the scenes and how powerful the hardware is. Would have been impossible to achieve this efficiency even a couple of years ago on a mobile device.

@ajroach42 well of *course* not - he just needs to get a Mac (only $1k) and install XCode and some other bits then join the Apple Developer program (only $99/yr!) and then he can make games for the iPad. Easy!